Page:Confessions of an Economic Heretic.djvu/29

 appeared some years ago (in 1871). From this early study I learned that, in the sphere of activity which absorbed most of the thought, interest, and energy of all our population, except a small leisure class, principles and laws governed the production and distribution of wealth which intelligent men and women accepted as belonging to the order of Nature. They established the justice, necessity, and finality of the existing economic system. This was not, of course, the personal attitude of J. S. Mill. Even in his Political Economy of 1848 he indulged in speculations of a socialistic future. “The form of association — which, if mankind continues to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves” (Bk. vi, chapter viii, §6). In his Autobiography (1871) he explains more explicitly his breakaway from Benthamism with its economic doctrines, and expressly adopts the title Socialist. “The social problem of the future we considered to be, how to unite the greatest individual liberty of action, with a common ownership in the raw material of the globe, and an equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour” (p. 232). But the academic Political Economy of the day continued to concern itself with the exposition of the laws of current industry, and disregarded these speculative aberrations, just as it had swept into the rubbish heap the early nineteenth-century English works on Socialism, dug out by H. S. Foxwell in his Introduction to Menger’s The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour, Not until much later on did I realize how potent was the influence of victorious capitalism to impress the justice and utility of its procedure upon the dawning science of Economics and to exclude from consideration all attempts to challenge its intellectual domination. When the leading nineteenth-century economists are accused of inhumanity and lack of sympathy with working-class aspirations, it is possible in most cases from Ricardo onwards, to cite passages which refute this accusation. But the substance of the accusation remains untouched. For these humanist obiter dicta were never incorporated in the body of their economic teaching which was always directed towards establishing natural laws of price and value in production and distribution aiming more and more at quantitative exactitude. But, while accepting these